


Studio Blossoms

by henghost



Category: ITZY (Band)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Loss of Virginity, Pre-debut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:28:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26214103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/henghost/pseuds/henghost
Summary: Yuna asks Jisu to let her into the advanced class in exchange for a favor.
Relationships: Choi Jisu | Lia/Shin Yuna
Kudos: 10





	Studio Blossoms

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on the movie WATER LILIES directed by Céline Sciamma. I'm still experimenting with different pairings but I think I like this one.

This was when I was still shorter than her. I had recently been accepted into the trainee program, but the classes themselves were tiered, so she, being more advanced than me, was never in the building at the same time I was. I only knew she existed because I’d passed her in the hallways once or twice. She’d made quite an impression, though: the girl who looked like a real adult, even though she must have only been a few years older than me. 

I first spoke to her at a party for trainees, boys and girls. It looked like the sort of party that only exists in teen movies. Lavish, a sugary smell of booze in the air, lit like an Argento movie. Technically I hadn’t been invited but someone, I forget who, gave me the address of the house, and at that point I knew none of my “peers,” so I thought I might as well show up. I spotted her dressed in jeans, a tank-top, kissing some boy between sips from a green bottle. 

The sight took my breath away. Suddenly I had no desire at all to make friends or even to speak to anyone, so I dashed through the house looking for the bathroom, and when I found it I slammed the door behind me and glared at myself in the mirror and practically hyperventilated. I told myself I had to get better at singing and dancing so I could be in the same class as her, no matter the cost.

Then someone barged in and dove for the toilet and retched over and over, and I was about to leave but then I looked again and it was her. I would’ve recognized that obsidian hair anywhere. I knelt and made sure it didn’t catch any of the vomit, and when she stood and drank from the sink I stayed and watched her. 

“Do you have gum?” she asked. And sure enough I did, and so I handed a stick of it to her and she chewed and spat it, mint-green and brainlike, into the trash. “What’s your name?” she said.

“Yuna.”

“Yuna. I’m Jisu.”

And she leaned down (I couldn’t have been much over five-foot at that point) and put her lips a centimeter from my nostrils and breathed and said, “Does my breath stink?”

And I said, “No,” which was a lie.

She left and soon after I went out the backdoor and back home and lay in my bed and replayed the scene again and again until I fell asleep.

#

Next day I got up early and took the train over to the Company building and loitered by the door, although I didn’t have a class until the late afternoon, and really I should’ve been in Homeroom. I watched as the advanced trainees and administrative staff shuffled inside. 

Finally Jisu arrived. She looked at me like she’d never seen me before. I stopped her before she went in and said, “Can I ask you a favor?”  
“Oh, you’re…” she said, “uh, yeah, what is it?”

“Would you, um, let me watch your practice? It’s just I’m trying to get better, you know, so ....”

She put her chin in her hands like she was really considering it. Finally she said, “No,” and started back inside.

I grabbed her by the wrist and said, “Please — please, I’ll do anything you want.”

“No,” she said, and ripped free.    


I shivered in the morning cold and wondered what I’d done to upset her. Probably nothing, I decided. It was probably only that I was young and small and ugly and stupid. Why would someone like her want to help me?

But then she came out of the building and looked at me and said, “Anything?”

“Anything,” I said.

She beckoned for me to follow her and said, “Wait here afterward.”

The advanced class was a sight to behold. Limbs everywhere and music loud enough to rattle your eardrums. Perfect synchronization, too, like you could’ve taken a picture at any point in the routine and been unable to tell their poses apart. They were leagues above me. And Jisu was the best by far. At least, she was the only one I watched. At one point the instructor, this tall man in athletic clothes, pointed at me and asked me who I was and why I was there, but Jisu got up close to him and explained how I was her friend, and he got this misty look and said it was fine.

When it was over I waited outside the locker room for her to change and when she came out she took me by the hand and led me outside.

“So what is it you want me to do?” I said.

“I’ll show you. Follow me.”

She took me down an alleyway, south a few blocks, until we reached a sort of garage that had storage lockers embedded into the walls. And lurking in the dark was the boy I’d seen her kissing at the party. She jogged forward and took his hand and looked back at me and said, “Keep watch.” And they went into one of the storage units. 

Perhaps I shouldn’t have done what she said, but I did. I stood at the other end of the place with my back to the concrete and tried not to cry. When the two came out maybe an hour later she thanked me and took off, and I went home and finally free from onlookers allowed myself to weep.

#

In my own dance class a day or two later we stretched before beginning in earnest, and a girl I knew — Suah — leaned over and whispered in my ear: “I saw you hanging out with that girl Jisu.”

“Yeah,” I said. “So?”

“So I don’t know if you should. She’s kind of a slut.”

After the class Jisu found me and pulled me into a room off to the side. She said, “I’ll let you into the class again tomorrow if you come do the same thing you did the other day.”

She stood very close to me when she said this. I said, “Fine.”

There was a knock at the door, and she told me to open it, and I did. Her dance instructor.

“Hey, uh, is Jisu here?” he said.

“I’m here,” said Jisu, and stepped forward to look him in the eye. He reached out to touch her but she slapped his hand away. “What do you want?”

“I was just thinking, you know,” he said, “you’ve been doing so much work recently, and you must be so tense, and…”

“And?” she said.

“I was thinking you might want a massage.”

“Leave me alone.”

“Hey,” and he pressed farther into the room, “hey, come on.” He put his big hand on her shoulder. It felt as though they’d totally forgotten about me. Then his other hand on her other shoulder, and she sort of bit her lip.

“Fine,” she said. “Just this once. Yuna, give me a couple of minutes.”

I waited outside and thought that the girl in my dance class must have been right. It shouldn’t have surprised me. She looked the way she did, and the environment was ripe for it. It shouldn’t have made my chest hurt. I tried not to listen to them. 

They came out of the room a few minutes later, both red-faced, and the instructor dashed away, and Jisu sort of patted my head and then we were off toward another rendezvous. I watched her as she walked. Would I go through the same thing as I got older? Always going breathlessly between boys? I couldn’t imagine it. It didn’t seem like me….

In the inky shadows of the garage was the same boy as the last time. He went into one of the storage units before Jisu had a chance to join him, and I call I could hear was the staticky rush of traffic, and all at once it seemed so fucking pathetic. I put my face in my hands and couldn’t stop myself from crying. 

She put her hand on me and said, “Yuna? Yuna, what’s wrong?”

I said, “I’m not — I can’t sit around and listen to you  _ fuck  _ somebody again!” And I tore myself from her grasp and went sprinting off into the nearby park. I didn’t feel my legs under me at all. The sun was high above me and the only smell was warm grass. I wasn’t headed anywhere in particular. 

She grabbed my arm from behind me and wouldn’t let go. “Let go,” I said. But she wouldn’t.

“Yuna,” she said. “Yuna I’m so sorry.”

“Just let me go.”

“Yuna — look at me.”

I couldn’t refuse her, so I did, and saw that she was crying as well. “Yuna, I’m so so so sorry. Can we just talk?” And she pointed at a bench under a tree a few yards away. I thought about refusing but then she was pulling me, and she was much stronger than I was.

Under the low maple, a mess of orange and violet this time of year, she said, “I know what they say about me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard any rumours about me. Tell me. Tell me what you’ve heard.”

“They say, you know, they say you’re like a slut.”

“It’s not true.”

“Well, frankly—”

“I act like it, but it’s not true. I’ve never, you know, done it. I’m a virgin. It’s only ever kissing. Whenever they get their underwear off or whatever — I don’t know — I just get so scared….”

“Really?”

“Really! Shik-won hates me for it. But it’s true. He’s tried so many times. One time — oh god — one time I was practicing late at night in that studio, you know, on the third floor, and at one point I was doing this sort of ground move, and I turned and saw a pair of hairy legs. And I stood and saw it was him, come to join my dance practice without pants. His dick was spinning around like a goddamn pinwheel. God it was so gross. I’m sure you’ve got lots of stories like that.”

I didn’t say anything.

She said, “Hey, Yuna, wanna come to my place? Just to hang out or whatever?”

I said sure, and she took me by the hand to the nearest train station.

#

A few hours later we were in her bed, staring at her high ceiling. Her house was bigger than I expected, and I had expected it to be big. Her family must’ve been well-off or something. There wasn’t six inches of space between us in the bed, and every so often she would slide her hand over just a bit so her pinkie would touch mine, which made my heart hammer in my chest. I think she did it just to see if that would happen.

“Oh god,” she said at one point. “I think I’m going to die a virgin. At this rate I definitely will. I should just fucking — I should just go to a nightclub or something and get some stranger to do it.”

“That would be a sight to see,” I said. “You hitting on some old guy.”

“You wanna come with me?”

“I don’t kn—”

“Come on! It would be so fun. Let’s do it! Tomorrow night, let’s do it.”

And I looked into her eyes like bottomless pools of earth and said, “Fine.”

“Great! Hey, you wanna see something funny?” And she got up and went to her closet and rummaged around until she found this sort of pink leotard thing and held it up. “This,” she said, “is the costume I wore for my first dance evaluation. Wanna try it on?”

I spent the next ten minutes or so trying to pull the thing over my shoulders, Jisu all the while laughing at me like it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen. I was giggling, too, before I finally got the straps over my shoulders. She must’ve worn it when she was my age.

I slept in it. We slept in the same bed.

#

In the morning she took me out — literally — with the trash. She led me out to the curb and put a plastic bag in the trashcan on the edge of the street. “I’ll pick you up this evening,” she said. I started off back toward the train station, but when she went inside again, I dashed back and took the bag out of the can and brought it home with me. 

I couldn’t say why, exactly. I emptied it out onto the desk in my room. Mostly papers, some rotting apple-cores here or there. I thought it might smell like her. I took one of the apple-cores, greenish-brown and sticky, and took a bite from it. It did not smell like her, in fact, but it did remind me of her.

I lay in bed and chewed. I thought how nice it would be to spend every night like that — there beside her. I wanted more than anything for her to tie me up, hog-tie me or something, my wrists to my ankles, and put me in bed and sleep next to me like that, the way she had last night. I wanted to have no choice in the matter.

I spent the whole day like that: wondering. Thinking about what if. I should’ve been in school, and I had a vocal class in the afternoon, but I skipped that as well. I couldn’t rip my mind free from her grasp. 

When the sun had gone runny-yellow at the horizon she came to get me. My room was on the ground level, and its back wall was made entirely of glass and looked out over our tiny lawn. She ambled up to it and put her lips on the clear door. Her lipstick made a mark. I let her in. She was dressed casually but she said she had something to change into in her bag. I went in the clothes I had on. 

Sure enough, on the train into downtown she pulled off her top — there were plenty of people to see — and put on in its place a cropped thing that left her midriff exposed. I swallowed and wondered if I should’ve gotten dressed up as well.

The nightclub itself was bathed in red, as if someone had bled onto the lightbulbs. I sat at a high circular table in the corner. I’d never been in a nightclub before. I didn’t know what you were supposed to do. Jisu went over to the bar and got two bottles and brought one over to me. I had never really had alcohol before, either. It tasted like burning, and I gagged, and she laughed at me and grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the strobing dance floor.

She put her hands above her head and sort of swiveled and shook. Meanwhile I couldn’t move. The thought of all these people seeing my miserable excuse for dancing was just too much to consider. She got up close to me — very close, so that her body encompassed mine. It made my heart hurt. She put her face just an inch away from mine. Still I was stuck in paralysis. I lost sight of anything outside of us. It all went to black.

When I came back to lucidity, though, some man — maybe thirty years old — had his crotch against her ass. I left them to it. I ran outside.

In the chilly twilight I tried to forget about it. I didn’t know what  _ it  _ was exactly, only that it rattled around my head like so many dead flies. Jisu was beautiful, beautiful in the way that made men brainless and angry, and I was only a little girl, still so small and undeveloped. She only talked to me, I was sure, out of a sense of pity. That was the only logical explanation. 

I saw her and the same stranger come out of the club, go into what was presumably his car. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. I watched them through the window, backlit by the moon that was only now coming into view. The low light shimmered against their wet lips. Mouth-sounds like fish flapping around were the only noises. 

Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I went up to his window and knocked, but neither seemed to notice, so I knocked again, louder this time, like if allowed to continue I’d smash right through. The man turned to look at me and I said, “My friend has to leave.” And to my surprise she did. She got out of the car and ran off with me. 

“Oh god thank you,” she said. “He was an  _ aw _ ful kisser.”

“Don’t mention it,” I said. 

We didn’t go back to the club, instead found a nearby field and lay in the freezing grass and listened to the cars and buses and bikes and trains. Only when the sky had gone from black to navy to turquoise did we stop. She took me back to my house.

Before I could get inside she said, “Yuna, I want it to be you. I want you to be … I want you to be my first.”

I thought for a moment. By that time I was too exhausted to feel real panic, so I thought about it rationally. Finally I said, “No.”

“No?” she said.

“No,” I said, and went inside. 

When I was sure she had left I kissed the lipstick-mark she’d left on my door.

#

Throughout the day that followed I tried to keep my mind occupied. I studied intensely at school, and at my dance class I threw my body around with no regard for “exhaustion” or “soreness.” But this was a doomed strategy from the beginning. She was there, at the building, always in my periphery.

I sat in the locker room to hide, but that proved ineffectual. She came to find me, still dressed in her dance-clothes, and sat on one of the low wood benches beside me. She said, “Shik-won got me a necklace. Would you put it on for me?” She held it up for me — a gold chain with a dainty little cross.

She took off the necklace she had on and lifted up her hair, and I clipped the new one around her neck. Then she gave me the old one to me and lifted my hair up and put it around my neck. 

“Fine,” I said.

“Fine what?” she said.

“I’ll do it,” I said. “I’ll be your first.” And she grinned at me.

I went back to her house with her. She got on her bed and put a quilt over herself and sort of shimmied out of her sweat-pants. I lay next to her and got up on my side and wordlessly slid my hand under the covers, down her stomach, lower. I found her hair, coarse and damp, and put my middle finger inside her. She winced and grunted. I went in and out of her and put my face closer to hers but stopped myself from kissing her. She looked up at me and there were tears in her eyes.

Eventually she put her hands around my arm to stop me, at which point her doorbell rang. She put her clothes back on and went to answer it, and I went with her. The door opened: Shik-won. He waved at me. I brushed past him and left.

#

Against my better judgement I attended another party the next night. This one was inside the Company building, which was almost definitely against the rules, but I wasn’t going to be the one to tattle. In one of the practice studios they’d put a card table with drinks and powerful neon lights — red, purple, green, and more — and EDM to blast you away.

I felt used. I should’ve kept to my refusal, I thought. I should’ve waited until I was sure, because at the moment I felt anything but sure. Maybe she, too, didn’t know what she was doing. Or maybe she did. I could never tell what she was thinking.

I found Suah in one of the quieter rooms. “Yuna,” she said, “what have you been up to? Hanging out with Jisu more?”

“Mostly she’s been hanging out with Shik-won,” I said.

“Shik-won? Are they supposed to be dating or something?”

“You look worried.”

“Well, it’s just that, uh, Shik-won showed up at my place yesterday.”

“Your place?”

“Yeah. Yeah, he said he got into a fight with someone — I guess it must’ve been Jisu — and then he invited himself in, and one thing led to another, and….”

“You slept with him?”

“Basically.”

“Shit,” I said, and walked away from her. I peered into the neon-lit room and saw her with Shik-won and there was a big space between them — or maybe that was only my imagination. They glared at one another. Did that mean I was still Jisu’s only partner? I couldn’t breathe. I went down a floor and hid in another one of the seemingly endless practice-rooms.

I wouldn’t be alone for long, I knew. She could always find me. She was all I had to look forward to. Either being her or being with her. I wasn’t sure which I wanted. The air-conditioner whirred and covered me in ice. I would be in rooms like this for the rest of my life. To age meant only to get bigger. There would be no increased understanding. Not for anyone.

She did in fact find me. I don’t know how. Magic. She sat beside me on the shining hardwood floor and said, “Yuna — where’ve you been?”

“Here,” I said. “I don’t know. Jisu, yesterday, did you…?”

“What, fuck him? No. I don’t know why I can’t. It’s just so — so scary. We were just fighting about it.”

Her breath smelled of alcohol. I found it disgusting.

“Yuna,” she said. “I’m so glad I got to know you. I’m glad we became friends. I’m not sure I could’ve gotten through this past week or so without you. I hope we get to work together for a long time.”

Then she leaned forward and kissed me. I kissed her back. But that was it. After a few seconds she stood up and went back to the party, and I didn’t. I stayed on the ground and wallowed in the feeling.

Later on I went to see what had become of her. When I spotted her, though, she was kissing someone else, another boy, another stranger. Of course, I thought. I went back down to the empty studio and practiced in front of the wall-mirror. I danced and danced for hours and hours, and I was afraid I would never be able to stop. Sweat went through my clothes, but still I kept at it. I was afraid I would keep dancing until I died. I was afraid I would never die.

I suppose you know the rest of the story.


End file.
